Steve Shead Dot Com

CISOs Keep Breach Costs Lower

The latest “Cost of a Data Breach” survey from the Ponemon Institute finds companies with a CISO are better able to handle loss of sensitive information
By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor
Companies continue to pay a high price to clean up the mess created by a data breach, but having a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) may [...]

Companies on IT Security Spending: Where’s the ROI?

Companies have spent millions to bolster their IT security in recent years. But some are starting to wonder if it’s been worth it, according to the 2010 Cyber Security Watch survey CSO conducted with the U.S. Secret Service, Carnegie Mellon University CERT and Deloitte & Touche.
By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor, CSO Online
Companies have spent many [...]

Your 5-Step Malware-Analysis Toolkit

From http://www.campustechnology.com By Lenny Zeltser
A LARGE NUMBER of computer intrusions involve some form of malicious software (malware), which finds its way to the victim’s workstation or to a server. When investigating the incident, the IT responder typically seeks to answer questions such as: What actions can the malware specimen perform on the system? How does [...]

Advanced Process Whack-a-Mole

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Ed Prepares to Open Up a Can of Process Whoop-Ass:
I’ve never considered myself a particularly violent man. But, I have to admit it: Sometimes it just feels good to kill processes. I’ve even been heard to mutter a deadpan “Dodge This” in my lab late [...]

USB History

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Ed Embarks:
Believe it or not, one of the things that we strive for in this blog is to be, not to put too fine a point on it, actually useful. We keep our musings here away from the theoretical and focused on the practical, in [...]

How to convert email addresses into name, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation

From: http://maxklein.posterous.com/
So you have somehow begged, borrowed or stolen an email list of 1000 users who you believe are interested in your new service. Would it not be great if you could somehow convert that list into real people, with real photos, and perhaps even more concrete information like “My service has a higher than [...]

Say Hello to My Little Friend Netstat

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Ed greets 2010:
Many times on our little blog here, I’ve spoken appreciatively of some of my favorite Windows command-line friends, including wmic, netsh, and sc. Yes, I’ve fought the desire to personify them, but I can’t help but think of them as buddies… Buddies with [...]

Yule Be Wanting an Explanation Then

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Hal returns to the scene of the crime
I opened last week’s post saying there would be no “explanations or excuses”, but apparently that wasn’t good enough for some of you. So at the request of our loyal readers, we’d like to revisit last week’s episode [...]

Yule Love It!

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Hal has indulged in a bit too much holiday cheer:
Presented for your enjoyment with no explanation or excuses:
$ ct=12; while read line; do
[ $ct == 1 ] && echo -n Plus || echo -n $ct;
echo ” $line”;
((ct–));
done <<EoLines
keyboards drumming
admins smiling
systems thrashing
networks crashing
hosts a-pinging
Windows versions
(billion) Linux [...]

RockYou Hack: From Bad To Worse

From Techcrunch.com – by Nik Cubrilovic
Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their [...]

Getting the perfect Perm(s)

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Tim unwraps:
One of the things I find myself doing on a regular basis is creating a new directory structure and setting the permissions. The permissions are different for each folder and are based on who in the organization needs access to it. We could just [...]

The Many Evil Ways to Make Money Online

From http://www.consumingexperience.com/
Currently, the main evil ways people make money off the Internet (i.e. take money from innocent you & me!) are:

Phishing – impersonating bank web sites in order to steal people’s banking details
Selling pharmaceuticals online – Viagra, of course; selling prescription drugs to people who don’t have a prescription
Selling cameras etc online – they take [...]

That Special Time of Year

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Tim plays Santa:
A merry listener in the PaulDotCom IRC channel asked:
[Dear Santa]…is there a way to delete certain characters in a for loop from cmd.exe (such as nul, tab, etc)?
Santa slightly nods and begins his exclaims, “Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer, and Vixen! On, [...]

Malware that operates as a Firefox extension

Here’s a good overview of malware that operates as a Firefox extension. The PDF is by Symantec via Lenny Zeltser.

Joining Up

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Hal fields a question from IRC
Mr. Bucket passed along the following query from the PaulDotCom IRC channel:
What functionality is available to loop through multiple files, and write the output to a single file with some values on the same line? Ex: If one program gives [...]

The Tangled Web

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Hal gets a soft one this week
Lately we’ve had some of our loyal readers– mostly the Windows folk– asking about command-line tools for accessing web pages. When these questions come up, I just smile serenely, because it’s easy to do this in Unix. Ed and [...]

Man-in-the-middle attacks demoed on 4 smartphones

Security researchers from SMobile Systems have released a paper detailing successful man-in-the-middle attacks against several smartphones.
The SSL enabled log in sessions on the tested, Nokia N95, HTC Tilt, Android G1 and iPhone 3GS devices was sniffed using the publicly available SSLstrip tool, with the attack taking place over insecure Wi-Fi network, now prevalent literally everywhere. [...]

Destroy All Connections

From: COMMAND LINE KUNG FU: PaulDotCom, Ed Skoudis, Hal Pomeranz, byte_bucket
Ed looks out on the serene waters of Tokyo Bay:
Mr. Byte Bucket sent in a request from the ever insightful Pauldotcom IRC channel:
Can anyone suggest a Windows cmd to disconnect a specific socket?
Nice question! Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t offer much in the way of built-in tools [...]